After the
disappearance of the Sherlock Sidewinder in 1876 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the
very first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study
in Scarlet in 1886 as an aide memoir to the strange creature that
captivated him and the explorer Charles Burroughs all those years ago. Then one
day in 1892 a strange note arrived in an unknown hand, slipped under his door
in the middle of the night.

‘Be at the corner of Baker Street
tonight at 11pm.’

Arthur
arrived early, a sturdy revolver in his pocket his head full of questions. It
was a clear moonlit night; a single lamp post cast an eerie glow. Arthur
checked his watch, two minutes to go but not a soul was around. Then from one
of the alleys further up Baker Street he noticed a low drifting mist across the
pavement, slowly rolling and billowing in his direction. His hand slipped into
his pocket and gripped the revolver.

There was a
shape in the mist, barely discernable but he could see something strangely
writhing towards him. The mists swirled around the creature giving little away
as to its shape, was that a hat? a cane? Arthur raised the revolver ready for
anything.

Anything but
the blow that knocked him sideways into a door way and on to the floor, pinned
down by some unknown entity that was wrapped tightly around his body, the mists
swirled over his head and a voice whispered ‘Shhhh!’ Unable to move Arthur
watched in amazement as the mists parted and he saw the creature for the first
time. Looking similar in stature to the Sherlock Sidewinder a most evil looking
entity slithered down the street, small beady eyes looked dartingly from left
to right whilst a red lined cape swirled around behind. The whole thing felt
abhorrent, unnatural as it disappeared around the corner.

The voice whispered again ‘Moriarty. The games
afoot!’ and with that he felt the grip around his waste loosen as something,
someone released its hold and with that was gone. Whatever had appeared so
quickly had also disappeared into the shadows the same way. All that was left
was an unusual smell, a smell that Arthur recognised, the unmistakeable smell
of pipe smoke. The Sherlock Sidewinder was back.

When Arthur
returned home later that night he found a second note had been slipped under
the door.

‘There is more to this than you can
possibly imagine’

The very next
day Arthur visited Charles Burroughs and described his adventure with the
strange creature called Moriarty and the return of the Sidewinder, Charles
immediately set to work using Arthur’s description to paint the Menacing
Moriarty Marauder. Arthur, his head spinning from the events sensed that he was
being dragged into something quite sinister.

It played on
his mind for many weeks, interrupting his frame of mind to such an extent that
he decided the only way he was going to get to the bottom of this mystery was
to devote time to it. So in 1893 Arthur sent an anguished letter to his mother,
the Sherlock Holmes stories were distracting him from the real mystery that had
presented itself. ‘I must save my mind for better things’ he wrote, ‘even if it
means I kill off Holmes’.

The Adventure of the Final Problem was published
in 1893, in it Arthur describes a fatal meeting between Sherlock and of course
the now infamous Moriarty based on his real life adventure that a misty night
in Baker Street. It gave Arthur time to really pursue his own personal mystery,
one which would lead him to public outcry and his greatest discovery in 1901.